WHY THE VATICAN SENT CARDINAL PAROLIN TO MOSCOW
Expert: "He intends to facilitate good relations between Russia and the Holy See"
by Andrei Yashlavsky
Moskovskii Komsomolets, 21 August 2017
On Monday, the visit to Russia of Cardinal Pietro Parolin, who occupies the post of State Secretary of the Holy See, began. In the run-up to the arrival of such a highly placed diplomat from the Vatican, suppositions about the agenda of this visit abounded in news media. They even said that there will be a discussion of the possibility of Roman Pope Francis coming to the Russian land. However, these rumors were refuted last week. Nevertheless, the cardinal's visit promises to be highly charged.
On the schedule of Cardinal Parolin's three-day stay in Russia appears a meeting with President Putin, head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Lavrov, Patriarch of Moscow and all-Rus Kirill, and also with the head of the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow patriarchate, Metropolitan of Volokolamsk Ilarion.
As the deputy general director of the Center of Political Technology, Aleksei Makarkin, commented earlier for Moskovskii Komsomolets regarding the up-coming arrival of the State Secretary of the Holy See, the Vatican and Russia have questions for discussion, and in the first place there is the situation in the Middle East. In the expert's opinion, it was because of the fact that the Vatican's position on the Middle East issue differs from that of the West that last year's meeting of the Roman Pope and Patriarch Kirill in Cuba became possible. "The Vatican acts as the patron of Near Eastern Catholics and positions itself as the defender of Near Eastern Christians, and the prospect of the creation in Syria of an Islamist regime absolutely does not suit it. Because there already is the experience of what happened to the Christian community in Iraq, where the activation of radicals led to a serious worsening of the position of Christians in comparison with the time of Saddam Hussein. The Vatican has an interest in seeing that the rights of Christians are preserved. And here there appeared the possibility for convergence. . . ."
"Cardinal Parolin intends to facilitate good
relations
between Russia and the Holy See, and at the same time to give an
impulse to the
advance of relations between the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church and the
Holy See," the famous
Vaticanist Andrea Gagliarducci commented for
MK. "It should not be forgotten that
after the
meeting in Havana, these contacts multiplied. As a consequence
of the Havana
meeting, pieces of the relics of Saint Nicholas were transported
from Bari to
Russia for a month. Patriarch Kirill asked Pope Francis for the
'gift' of
veneration in the motherland for a period of a month and the
pope
consented."
Speaking of the
possibility of a visit
by the head of the Roman Catholic Church, Andrea Gagliarducci
noted: "The
Roman pope has been invited, and the fact that the pope has
never come to
Russia is, among other things, a consequence of the reaction of
the most
orthodox part of Russian Orthodox. Now the times seem
favorable."
As regards the
invitations of the
pontiff to Moscow, Andrea Gagliarducci recalls that the first
such invitation
was voiced by Gorbachev during his visit to the Vatican on 1
December 1989, and
then also by Yeltsin in December 1991 and February 1998.
Andrea Gagliarducci
said that Cardinal
Parolin and Patriarch Kirill have already met in February 2016,
during the
meeting of the head of the RPTs and Pope Francis in Cuba.
Cardinal Parolin has
also met twice with President Putin, on 25 November 2013 and 10
June 2015
during two visits by the Kremlin head in the Vatican. In both
instances, at the
center of the conversations was the geopolitical situation,
focused on the
Middle East and Ukraine. (tr.
by
PDS, posted 22 August 2017)
Editorial disclaimer: RRN does
not intend to certify the accuracy of information
presented in articles. RRN simply intends to certify the
accuracy of the English translation of the contents of the
articles as they appeared in news media of countries of
the former USSR.
If material is quoted, please give credit to the
publication from which it came. It is not necessary to credit
this Web page. If material is transmitted electronically, please
include reference to the URL,
http://www.stetson.edu/~psteeves/relnews/.